Lifestyle
Everything you need to know about the radical feminist movement that preaches 'no sex'
SEOUL — The election of Donald Trump has sparked a surge of interest in the United States in South Korea’s 4B movement, a radical feminist crusade that preaches the four B’s: bi-hon (no marriage), bi-yeonae (no dating), bi-sekseu (no sex) and bi-chulsan (no childbirth).
Since Nov. 5, there have been more than 500,000 Google searches for “4b movement,” while on TikTok, Instagram and X, support for the cause has been trending among young women voters who are vowing to swear off men.
“Ladies, we need to start considering the 4B movement like the women in South Korea and give America a severely sharp birth rate decline,” read one post on X with over 450,000 likes.
“We can’t let these men have the last laugh… we need to bite back”
“Reminder that the 4B movement, and the separatist movement in general, isn’t just about avoiding men—it’s also about supporting and investing in women,” read another.
Here’s what to know about the movement and its impact in South Korea:
What is the 4B movement and when did it come about?
While its exact origins or founder is unknown, scholars and activists agree that the 4B movement began in South Korea sometime after 2015, as part of a wider wave of youth-led radical feminism popularized through online forums.
Its emergence coincided with several major events that have fueled a wider reckoning of South Korea’s gender inequalities in the workplace and violence against women.
One of these events was the murder of a young woman in a public toilet in Seoul’s wealthy Gangnam district in 2016. The assailant, a 34-year-old male with a history of mental illness, later testified to police that he had stabbed the woman — whom he did not know — because he had been shunned by women in the past.
A woman enters a booth to cast her early vote for a presidential election at a local polling station in Seoul in March 2022.
(Ahn Young-joon/Associated Press)
The movement was spurred further by the #MeToo movement’s arrival in South Korea in 2018, the year that also saw mass public protests against the widespread circulation of nonconsensual pornography.
“For women, love, dating, marriage and childbirth were no longer perceived as refuges of peace and safety, but the site of exposure to male violence and subordination,” feminist scholar Yoon-kim Ji-young wrote in 2020, describing the 4B movement as “the complete severing of any emotional, mental, financial or physical dependence on men.”
In recent years, some adherents have expanded the movement into a variant known as 6B, which also calls for bi-sobi (no consumption of products that endorse misogyny or engage in sexist marketing) and bi-dop-bi — solidarity between unmarried women.
Despite bursts of virality and media coverage, the movement is still far from mainstream, and given its decentralized online existence, there is no concrete data on how many South Korean women actively identify as “4B.”
One of the most common ways for adherents to signal their commitment is to share social media posts with 4B-related hashtags, such as investment tips for women’s financial independence and photographs showcasing happily unmarried lives.
Some cities, Daejeon and Gwangju among them, also have 4B-themed offline communities where followers can socialize through sports, book clubs or skills-building workshops.
Some feminist scholars and activists in South Korea have criticized these lifestyle-oriented aspects of the 4B movement, arguing that individual acts of opting out ultimately do little to meaningfully advance women’s sex and reproductive rights in society at large. “At the center of young women’s commitment to 4B is the desire to focus on themselves,” feminist scholar Cho Joo-hyun wrote in 2020.
“The logical endpoint of that is becoming a successful individual in neoliberal society,”
Where does South Korea stand on gender equality?
By many gender equality metrics, South Korea lags behind much of the industrialized world.
The wage gap between men and women is the largest among the 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of wealthy countries, with South Korean women paid on average a third less than their male counterparts. In the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Gender Gap Index, which measures gender parity across economic opportunities, education, health and political leadership in 146 countries, South Korea is ranked 105th.
Disparities remain stark in the home as well. In households where both spouses work, women spend an average of 187 minutes a day on domestic work while men spend just under one-third of that — 54 minutes — according to government data from 2019.
Violence against women has also been criticized as an area of long neglect. Dating violence has seen a sharp increase in the country of 51 million, rising from 49,225 reported cases in 2020 to 77,150 last year, according to police. In addition, women in the country are victimized by deep-fake pornography at the highest rates in the world, according to an analysis of online content between July and August last year by U.S.-based cyber-security firm Security Hero.
In South Korea’s last election, conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol’s campaign was widely criticized for making misogynist appeals to young male voters, with Yoon denying that structural sexism exists and promising to raise penalties for false rape accusations.
Has the 4B movement managed to pull down South Korea’s birthrate?
Despite claims on social media that the 4B movement is behind South Korea’s dismal fertility rate, there is little evidence to back this up.
South Korea’s fertility rate — the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime — currently sits at 0.72, the lowest in the world and far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. Like most advanced economies, South Korea’s fertility rate has steadily been falling since 1980. Researchers have attributed its first significant dip in 2001 — to “lowest-low” levels of under 1.3 — to the labor market shocks caused by the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.
In more recent years, rising housing and child-rearing costs as well as workplace pressures forcing women to choose between motherhood and their careers have driven the figure down even further.
And while it is true that young South Koreans are increasingly disillusioned with marriage in favor of childless or single lifestyles, these changes are not exclusive to women. Today, just 28% of South Korean women and 42% of men in their 20s see marriage as necessary, dropping from around 50% and 70% in 2008, according to government data.
Lifestyle
This spring, have a tea ceremony inside of an art installation and shop the latest Givenchy
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Ryan Preciado’s site-responsive “Diary of a Fly” at Hollyhock House features Oaxacan-woven textiles.
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(Mr Wash)
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Jessie Buckley has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of William Shakespeare’s wife in Hamnet.
Kate Green/Getty Images
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Kate Green/Getty Images
Actor Jessie Buckley says she’s always been drawn to the “shadowy bits” of her characters — aspects that are disobedient, or “too much.” Perhaps that’s what led her to play Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet.
Buckley says the film, which is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, offered a chance to counter a common narrative about the playwright’s wife: that she “had kept him back from his genius,” Buckley says.
But, she adds, “What Maggie O’Farrell so brilliantly did, not just with Agnes and Shakespeare’s wife, but also with Hamnet, their son, was to bring these people … and give them status beside this great man. … [And] give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.”
The film is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best actress for Buckley. In it, she plays a woman deeply connected to nature, who faces conflicts in her marriage, as well as the death of their son Hamnet.
Buckley found out she was pregnant a week after the film wrapped. She’s since given birth to her first child, a daughter.
“The thing that this story offered me, that brought me into this next chapter of my life as a mother was tenderness,” she says. “A mother’s tenderness is ferocious. To love, to birth is no joke. To be born is no joke. And the minute something’s born into the world, you’re always in the precipice of life and death. That’s our path. … I wanted to be a mother so much that that overrode the thought of being afraid of it.”
Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Joe Alwyn plays her brother Bartholomew in Hamnet.
Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
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Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
Interview highlights
On filming the scene where she howls in grief when her son dies
I didn’t know that that was going to happen or come out, it wasn’t in the script. I think really [director] Chloé [Zhao] asked all of us to dare to be as present as possible. Of course, leading up to it, you’re aware this scene is coming, but that scene doesn’t stand on its own. By the time I’d met that scene, I had developed such a deep bond with Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet, and [co-stars] Paul [Mescal] and Emily Watson, and all the children and we really were a family. And Jacobi Jupe who plays Hamnet is such an incredible little actor and an incredible soul, and we really were a team. …
The death of a child is unfathomable. I don’t know where it begins and ends. Out of utter respect, I tried to touch an imaginary truth of it in our story as best I could, but there’s no way to define that kind of grief. I’m sure it’s different for so many people. And in that moment, all I had was my imagination but also this relationship that was right in front of me with this little boy and that’s what came out of that.
On what inspired her to pursue singing growing up
I grew up around a lot of music. My mom is a harpist and a singer and my dad has always been passionate about music, so it was always something in our house and always something that was encouraged. … Early on, I have very strong memories of seeing and hearing my mom sing in church and this quite intense mercurial conversation that would happen between her, the story and the people that would listen to her. And at the end of it, something had been cracked between them and these strangers would come up with tears in their eyes. And I guess I saw the power of storytelling through my mom’s singing at a very young age, and that was definitely something that made me think I want to do that.
On her first big break performing as a teen on the BBC singing competition I’d Do Anything — and being criticized by judges about her physical appearance
I was raw. I hadn’t trained. I had a lot to learn and to grow in. I was only 17. I think there was part of their criticism which I think was destructive and unfair when it became about my awkwardness, or they would say I was masculine and send me to kind of a femininity school. … They sent me to [the musical production of] Chicago to put heels on and a leotard and learn how to walk in high heels, which was pretty humiliating, to be honest, and I’m sad about that because I think I was discovering myself as a young woman in the world and wasn’t fully formed. … I was different. I was wild, I had a lot of feeling inside me. I could hardly keep my hands beside myself and I think to kind of criticize a body of a young woman at that time and to make her feel conscious of that was lazy and, I think, boring.
On filming parts of the 2026 film The Bride! while pregnant
I really loved working when I was pregnant. I thought it was a pretty wild experience, especially because I was playing Mary Shelley and I was talking about [this] monstrosity, and here I was with two heartbeats inside me. Becoming a mom and being pregnant did something, I think, for me. My experience of it, it’s so real that it really focuses [me to be] allergic to fake or to disconnection.
Since my daughter has come and I know what that connection is and the real feeling of being in a relationship with somebody … as an actress, it’s very exciting to recognize that in yourself and really take ownership of yourself.
I’m excited to go back and work on this other side of becoming a mother in so many ways, because I’ve shed 10 layers of skin by loving more and experiencing life in such a new way with my daughter. I’m also scared to work again because it’s hard to be a mother and to work. That’s like a constant tug because I love what I do and I’m passionate and I want to continue to grow and learn and fill those spaces that are yet to be filled — and also be a mother. And I think every mother can recognize that tug.
On the possibility of bringing her daughter to travel with her as she works
I haven’t filmed for nearly a year and I cannot wait. I’m hungry to create again. And my daughter will come with me. She’s seven months, so at the moment she can travel with us and it’s a beautiful life. And she meets all these amazing people and I have a feeling that she loves life and that’s a great thing to see in a child. And I hope that’s something that I’ve imparted to her in the short time that she’s been on this earth is that life is beautiful and great and complex and alive and there’s no part of you that needs to be less in your life. You might have to work it out, but it’s worth it.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Bruce Campbell
I’m Battling Cancer
Published
Bruce Campbell has revealed he has cancer, but says it’s a type that’s treatable, though not curable.
“The Evil Dead” actor shared the news Monday in a message to fans, writing, “Hi folks, these days, when someone is having a health issue, it’s referred to as an ‘opportunity,’ so let’s go with that — I’m having one of those.” He continued, “It’s also called a type of cancer that’s ‘treatable’ not ‘curable.’ I apologize if that’s a shock — it was to me too.”
Campbell said he wouldn’t go into further detail about his diagnosis, but explained his work schedule will be changing. “Appearances and cons and work in general need to take back seat to treatment,” he wrote, adding he plans to focus on getting “as well as I possibly can over the summer.”
As a result, Campbell says he has to cancel several convention appearances this summer, noting, “Treatment needs and professional obligations don’t always go hand-in-hand.”
He says his plan is to tour this fall in support of his new film, “Ernie & Emma,” which he stars in and directs.
Ending on a determined note, Campbell told fans, “I am a tough old son-of-a-bitch … and I expect to be around a while.”
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